Daemon
Ratings217
Average rating3.9
Replete with terrible and bland male characters who mostly view themselves as unrecognized gods of their own domains, this book dedicates pages upon pages to explaining unnecessary technical minutiae to cover the fact that there are gaping holes in the plot and fundamental ideas.
I held on as the plot descended into ridiculousness jus to see how it ended, only to be greeted with a “To be Continued”. Nope.
The 'out of controlness' of HAL meets the bloodlust of The Kingsman movies and ends up with a car chase/crash scene that rivals The Blues Brothers. This would have been SF when it was written twenty years ago but the computer development since then puts it into the techno-thriller genre with a political edge.
Billionaire computer game develop, Matthew Sobol, has spawned a distributed artificial intelligence network across the internet that is triggered on his death. The 'Daemon' sets in motion a slow burn revolution designed to undermine and take down the corporate industrial complex and in its place set up a system of equality. The daemon runs on the internet on tracks built into two of the online multi-player games that Sobol developed. Because it's not sitting on servers as identifiable code it can't be located. Recruitment happens among gamers who are disaffected young men who can be manipulated or attracted into taking part.
There is no lack of characters, sometimes too many to remember, and some of them are running assumed names and changing identities to infiltrate the govt agency that has been set up to fight the daemon. Dialogue is functional rather than relational, the pace of the action is fast and sometimes seductive, and sometimes it's confusing about who is alive and who is dead. There are some scenes of misogyny that Suarez would probably not include in 2025, or at least would modify.
Overall this action packed book is a good fast read. It is the first of a pair and it ends at a good point as long as the reader knows it's only the first half of the story. Most of it is enjoyable in the way of an action movie that we like but after it's over we go and buy pizza and life goes on. I'm happy to move straight into book 2, Freedom.
I think somewhere around the time the cop has a martial arts battle with his mistress is where I started to realize this book was not for me. I stuck it out for a while after but I found that I just was not really intrigued by any of the mystery and the action was a little too much like a bad 80s movie. I think this book will actually work for a lot of people. It isn't really ‘bad'. It's just not for me at all.
The tech info in this book is incredible - and the destruction it can wreak is, as well. A fast-paced tech thriller that will appeal to geeks. This would make a great movie, and I'm definitely moving on to the next installment.
A well thought-through technothriller. It doesn't need AI to make its premise conceivable that technology could effectively rule us. Characters & dialog are nothing special but the plot is great.
I'm a software developer and was very impressed by this book. I don't know what was scarier, the plausibility of the things described in this book or that I kept thinking of ways to do them.
Great action thriller for geeks. A bit too “showoffy” about knowing some tech terms at times, but well worth it.
First: it's one half of a book. Apparently book two vindicates a lot of book one, but I'm not sure I want to give Suarez the pleasure of making me read a whole second book after this one.
Spoiler
Second: it takes a really interesting and plausible near-future premise and then, in the final act, switches to absurdist sci-fi. Killer robots, man.
Third: there's a nightclub scene very early on that is awful, unsettling, and unnecessary. It's supposed to, maybe, make the character bad? But then a few scenes later, the narrator clearly wants us rooting for him.
I guess that's it, really. Disappointing after some strong setup.
Some very interesting ideas, almost more interesting than the story being told. I was discomforted to find myself switching allegiance halfway through the book, wanting the “good guys” to stop fighting against the Daemon.
Enjoyable science thriller. Screams out to be turned into movie series although it presents some difficulties in picking leading man or woman and the very depth and preciseness of the tech descriptions might throw some roadblocks as well.
Am not sure how this book stumbled into my to-read shelf but boy am I glad it did. After a long journey into Fantasy and science fiction, here is one book that looks are the not so far future and comes out with an very interesting if a bit ridiculous scenario. Daemon stretches reality as much as it can be stretched and will scare the daylight out of some people because unless you really understand technology some of the points that Daniel makes feel pretty realistic. The other thing Daniel does well is create his characters so its a bit of a let down that he does not follow through on them well enough but this may be because too many characters are given fairly in depth background and despite being a long novel, he is not able to do justice. Next lies the second book of the duology but I think I need a break. Freedom will wait for another day!
I really loved parts of this book and I really disliked other parts. I should preface this by saying that neither Cyberpunk nor Crime Fiction are my favorite genres and “Daemon” is really a hodgepodge of both of these. However, I did enjoy the resulting lovechild which is much more supernatural thriller than either of its component part. Not having the technical expertise necessary to understand 90% of Sobol's plans, I was left pretty much trusting that the events in the story were entirely magical in nature.
The technical babble rarely bogged me down and faded more to the blur of a Star Trek explanation. At first, I really enjoyed seeing what new twists the daemon would pull next, and I thought the integration of the gaming worlds was incredibly fun. Towards the end, my suspension of disbelief started to fray, and I kept thinking “There really must be an easier way.” Sobol is the type of person I genuinely despise, which I suppose makes him a great antagonist, but most of the time I was just as irritated and flustered as the protagonist.
The ending really left me on a limb. I'm not sure whether or not I'll go ahead with the second book. On one hand, I'd like some closure on the story , but on the other it doesn't seem like there can possibly be any positive closure in the future.
Not bad. The technical aspects of the story are not completely outlandish. My only real complaint is that, as the book progresses, it gets increasingly hard to suspend disbelief
It started off fairly plausible, but by the end had jumped off the deep end. Still it was a fairly enjoyable ride along the way. I'm a little disappointed with the ending. It left me feeling like the book was incomplete. Not so much a cliffhanger to get you wanting the next book, just sort of no real ending. Worth a read if you like tech fiction. I plan to read the sequel. Hopefully that will wrap up what missing from this book.
I was wildly tired last night, so picked this up. Pretty compulsive read so far.
It was compulsive in parts, but once you got all the pieces, less so. I like the idea behind it - very scarey and he's good at pushing the concept - but the books is too dependent on action verbs and caractures. I skimmed pages and pages. Still I'll probably, at the very least, skim the second to find out what happens.